ROMAN LUNKIN ON POLICY REGARDING JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES: "THIS IS A GAME OF CAT AND MOUSE"
SOVA Center for News and Analysis, 10 June 2015
The chief academic fellow of the Institute of Europe of the Russian Academy of Sciences and deputy to the head editor of the magazine Contemporary Europe, Roman Lunkin, analyzed for the SOVA center the actions of authorities regarding Jehovah's Witnesses.
Religious policy can be diverse: for example, intolerant but not necessarily repressive. It turns out that authorities like to manipulate religion. This is how the authorities manipulate Jehovah's Witnesses and their congregations, or the prohibition of their literature or their meetings. This is a game of cat and mouse, when the victim does not die in the end and maybe is even not eaten but is simply tossed and more because it has played with it enough. But in the course of the game the cat or the mouse learns and incarnates certain instincts.
The campaign against the Jehovah's Witnesses means a lot for representatives of the government. This is the possibility for developing methods of control over the network of a centralized organization, of recognition of their literature as extremist, and of intimidation of believers and attempts to limit the growth and influence of the movement. Antiwestern sanctions, both economic and ideological, have become a good backdrop for the struggle with a "foreign" organizations with its headquarters in the USA, like the Jehovah's Witnesses.
At the same time, nobody intercedes except rights advocates. Society approves the bullying of the "sectarians" and believes any insane fantasies about "Jehovists" in the mass media. That is, it is possible to play with them with impunity.
Prosecutors, courts, and Orthodox activists have carefully formulated this insane image of "Jehovists" in the Golovin district court in 2004 where the Jehovah's Witnesses association in Moscow was liquidated. But it seemed like insanity that the prosecutor in all seriousness tried to prove that Jehovah's Witnesses consider themselves the true religion, and for this they are subject to prohibition. It took the decision of the European Court for Human Rights eleven years in order to register the congregation.
In Taganrog in 2010 the organization of Jehovah's Witnesses was liquidated as "extremist" and its literature was found to be extremist, including a quote from Leo Tolstoy criticizing Orthodoxy. But in Taganrog the game went too far. Sixteen persons were convicted for belonging to a prohibited "extremist organization," and four of them were given a suspended sentence. It is obvious that these decisions will be overturned sooner or later
Against a backdrop of searches, inspections, confiscation of books and magazines, and rulings that they are extremist, Jehovah's Witnesses have remained within the bounds of law in Russia as a whole. In 2013, for example, courts in Belgorod and Cheliabinsk took the side of the believers, defending their right to public meetings and conduct of their congresses. And in 2015, 22 organizations of Jehovah's Witnesses were registered in Crimea at a time when there was underway a process of adoption of a law on combating "sectarians," under which the Jehovah's Witnesses could fall (the preamble of the draft speaks about the sacral signification of Crimea for Orthodoxy).
Ordinary human logic is unable to explain why the authorities persecute Jehovah's Witnesses. The number of their congregations has not diminished, but on the contrary it has increased a bit. The level of intolerance in society is growing. Believers often treat the government agencies as a sleeping vulture. But the sacred spiritual bonds are still protected. (tr. by PDS, posted 14 June 2015)
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